Page 36 of The Holiday Honeymoon Switch
“You had fun,” he says. “Admit it.”
His hands are still on her hips. His touch feels warm, and she suddenly has the urge to reach down and hold his hands against her, feel how smooth his skin is.
She’s so intent on trying to brush these physical longings away, she hardly notices when there’s a crash of thunder overhead. But milliseconds later, rain begins to fall in sheets, and she is brought back to reality. Oliver drops his hands from her hips and grabs her hand. “Come on!”
They run toward an empty market stall to take shelter—but just before they reach it, Ivy grinds to a halt. It’s Matt and Abby, heading for the same shelter. “No,” she says. “We have to go somewhere else.”
Oliver sees them, too, and, taking his cue from Ivy’s stricken expression, grabs her by the waist, pulls her close, and stares into her eyes as if he’s about to kiss her. Ivy’s body feels electrified, by the suddenness of this action, she tells herself, but she knows that’s not all. The rain is falling so hard her clothes have soaked through, but all she can feel is the touch of his hands.Get a hold of yourself, Ivy. This is not some romantic, cinematic scene in a rainstorm. He’s just trying to hide you from someone you don’t feel like facing right now. And. He. Has. A. Girlfriend.
“Are they gone?” she manages.
“They’re under the shelter, and they’re not looking at us right now,” Oliver says, his lips so close to hers she can almost taste him: she imagines citrus and coconut, a little bit of mint. “They’ve turned in the other direction.” She stares at him through the rain. His pupils are dilated; she can only see slender green rings at the edges of his irises. They continue to stand perfectly still, staring into each other’s eyes—and now Ivy feels like she couldn’t move if she wanted to. He’s the one who steps back, running one hand through his soaking wet hair, releasing a shaky breath.
“I know somewhere we can dry off,” he finally says. “Larry’s bar.”
Right.Larry. His beautiful, incredibly kind girlfriend. Ivy forces herself back to a reality where she and Oliver are not, in fact, the only two people on the planet, the way it felt seconds before, and follows him.
“Here we are.” They’ve reached the Black Pearl. Its sign swings above their heads, a carved wooden oyster with a radiant black orb inside. Oliver pulls her through the front door, and they stand in the entrance dripping, laughing at themselves.
“Hey, come on in, let’s get you two dry!” Larry calls out. She reaches under the bar and comes up with a handful of towels. Crossing the room, she hands some to Ivy, then turns her attention to Oliver. She stands on her tiptoes and rubs his hair with her towel so it stands up wildly in all directions.
“Hey,” he says, patting it down. “You’re messing with the do.”
“Honey, the rain messed with the do. Nothing could make it worse. We’ve been friends a long time, so I feel I can be this honest with you.”
Ivy feels a twinge, watching them together. They seem to have that rare combination of deep friendship and romance that Ivy didn’t think existed until she met them. But as Oliver grabs a towel from Larry and snaps it as she dances lightly away, Ivy knows it does exist. “What am I going to do with you?” Larry says over her shoulder as she heads back behind the bar.
Whatever spark she felt earlier with Oliver was surely one-sided. He had promised to shield her from Matt, thatwas all. And Larry is an angel. Ivy will not allow herself to feel jealous, will not indulge a wish to steal her boyfriend. Ivy is not that person. She takes off her soaked baseball cap, gathering her long, sopping hair into a ponytail, which she attempts to wring out into the towel.
“Please, just wring it out onto the floor,” Larry calls out with a friendly smile. “Your hat, too. Go ahead, it’s fine. I’ll mop it all up in a sec.”
Once Ivy and Oliver are some approximation of dry, Larry runs a mop over the floor while telling them to take a seat at the bar. Ivy takes in her surroundings. Larry’s bar is quirky and inviting; the walls are papered with vintage postcards depicting scenes from the South Pacific and various Hawaiian vistas. Strings of lights shaped like pineapples, surfboards, and palm trees are strung haphazardly across the top of the bar and from the ceiling, too. A record player sits behind the bar, and there are shelves beside the bottles stocked with vinyl.
Larry is currently spinning Janis Joplin’sPearl; Janis is singing about a guy who fills her like mountains, fills her like the sea.
“You two drowned rats look like you could use a cocktail,” Larry says. “Bartender’s choice?”
“Sure,” Ivy says. She glances over at Oliver, who has a weird look on his face. “What?”
“Oh, you don’t know what you’re signing up for,” Oliver says as Larry pulls a jar of juice with a big red skull andcrossbones on it out of the fridge. “You see?” Oliver declares. “Skull and crossbones.”
Ivy feels mildly alarmed. “What is that?”
“My special jalapeño-pineapple juice. Can you handle hot stuff, Ivy?”
“Of course,” Ivy says, and now Oliver’s sidelong glance seems to turn flirtatious.
“Yeah?” he says lightly, and she feels that one word zing like an electrical jolt that lands at the base of her pelvis, where heat begins to spread.
Maybe Holly is right. Maybe the idea of two weeks of sexual deprivation is too much for her libido—but shehasto rein these feelings in, and now.
“I like spicy food,” Ivy says primly, turning away from him and focusing on the decor again as Larry stands before them, mixing up their drinks. There are framed photos behind the bar—some of Larry and Oliver, Ivy notices, both smiling and looking blissfully happy, and others of Larry, Oliver, and another woman, or just Larry and the woman.
“Great photos,” Ivy says. Larry’s smile grows wider.
“Aren’t they? We had just gotten engaged in that one.” Ivy hates that her heart plummets when Larry says this.They’re engaged?She hopes her expression isn’t betraying her, that her smile doesn’t look as pained as it feels. “After we’re married, we’ll finally live together full-time and not do this long-distance, all-over-the-place stuff.” She tilts her head. “Although we still haven’t quite figured out how that’s goingto work.” Then she shrugs and smiles again, as Ivy thinks about what Oliver said to her when he was showing her the apartment—about how he only winters here in Hawaii, and has a serious case of wanderlust. “We will, though.” Larry mixes mezcal and Malibu rum with the spicy juice in a cocktail shaker. She’s more straightforward than Oliver is as a bartender; she doesn’t toss the shaker or showboat around behind the bar, just does her job steadily while singing Janis Joplin at the top of her lungs.
“When’s the wedding?” Ivy asks, directing the question at Oliver.
